Community Service

Offer yourself to others; this is the call of a spiritually intentional lifestyle. If you want to know love, unity, connection, peace, and divine consciousness than you need to stop thinking about the “I” and start thinking through your divine light, the one that sees everything the same as itself. In Buddhist philosophy it is not the benefactor that is giving in the act of charity but the recipient for they are providing the opportunity for the giver to awaken to the inseparable state of the interdependent existence and interconnected consciousness.

At the ashram two things are important to us:

1. That those who visit the ashram begin to awaken to the subtle nature of their spiritual being, living beyond the body and mind and walking in the light of their divine origins.
2. To use those resources that are available to us to serve humanity, offering ourselves as a medium for growth, evolution and change to take place within humanity.

As an active part of the development of community, there are a few areas that are of great importance to the ashram:

Education:

Though it has been said a thousand times before, it is always worth repeating: children create the solutions to the problems of today and the problems of the future. They are the next phase of human civilization and therefore the greater potentiality of our unrealized capacity. Through education children create their own solutions and visions for the future, ones that are likely to be more effective and holistic than the ones we ourselves create.

As adults our responsibility is the share all we know with the generations of the future and give them the opportunities to explore and recreate this knowledge. From there they will go beyond what we know today, opening the doorways to a reality we have yet to experience. But it all starts with knowledge. Without knowledge, insight, and wisdom, humanity becomes stagnant, and from here no progress is necessary.

To ensure the development of education in India the Tureya Ashram works to:

• Provide scholarships to students in lower economic strata of society;
• Encourage society to reform beliefs regarding the education of females, allowing equal distribution for the education of both sexes;
• Revitalize the traditional arts of India including dance, yoga, music, painting, martial arts, and writing through camps, workshops, and tutoring;
• Restructure education to involve more creative thinking as opposed to route memory training.

Social and Gender Equality:

A society that does not respect the capacity of all human beings as a society that suffers from inequality that ultimately affects everyone. No one is born superior to anyone else, and everyone has the same capacity to thrive so long as they are given equal opportunity and resources. At the ashram we work through the avenue of education and public conglomeration to encourage equality amongst men and women, poor and rich. Together, gender inequality and economic disparity create the greatest rifts in Indian culture, and by supplying those who are born reformers with the tools and resources to make their dreams possible we can change the face of Indian society. Though our efforts in these areas vary from year to year, some of the main forms we promote social and gender equality are:

• Offering free training in yoga therapy to lower-class citizens who can then apply their training to become spiritual leaders in a society predominantly upper-caste;
• Re-educate society about the spiritual tradition of India that is indiscriminate of caste or social status;
• Encourage the publication, promotion, and open discussion of women’s values, needs, and conceptions of the future of India in a public forum;
• Promote global leaders in women’s right to share their visions and ideas for actuating gender equality in India.